I woke up nineteen hours ago, knowing exactly what I was going to write in today’s blog. It just came to me, fully formed. But then I got up, and worked for the day, and went for a walk along the canal with Mammy and Lily and Mammy’s dogs. And then it was time for rosary in the graveyard – the annual gathering of families at the grave’s of our loved ones. Six of my cousins, Mammy, Lily and me stood around our family grave. Our second and third cousins stood at the neighbouring graves, other neighbours at more distant graves. Fr. Maher led us through a decade of the rosary and blessed the graves with holy water. I got a bit giggly with my cousins. The rosary always brings out the giggles in me, taking me back to nights at home here, kneeling on the sitting room floor, my Nana leading the rosary and my sister and me shaking with stifled laughter over some silliness.
When the priest had finished, I went to say hello to the second and third cousins. Seamus is 92 now, Niamh has just had a baby, Michael is about to become a grandfather for the first time. And then it was back to my own gang and down to our house for tea, sandwiches, cake and biscuits.
I don’t really blame Colette for me not writing the blog I was planning to write today. But she is the ring leader of the chat and the stories and the gossip, and if you thought we’d done all the chatting that needed to be done two nights ago, then you’d be very wrong. We’re a noisy bunch when we get together – talking and laughing, sharing stories, reminiscing, enjoying each other’s company. And then it was close to midnight and time for the cousins to leave. Colette couldn’t find the key to her house, so we thought she was going to end up staying the night, likely sharing the bed with me. She found the key in the end – so we missed that opportunity to relive Christmas nights and holidays of old.
In four weeks’ time we’ll all be back here in the living room again, for more tea and sandwiches and cake and chat and laughter. I can’t wait. I’m going to write today’s blog early tomorrow.
The deep history of Ireland is written in its landscape. In Donegal, the waves crash against the coast, turning cliff to cave, cave to arch, arch to stack, over aeons of time, crashing endlessly; cliff, cave, arch, stack, each a moment in its transformation into what it will become. Imagine speeding this erosive action up, so that these millions of years, tens of millions of years, hundreds of millions of years, can be seen to pass in a time frame that is comprehensible to creatures as short-lived as us.
Or maybe those aeons of time – the mere blip in the history of the universe that it took to transform cliff to cave to arch to stack – is too vast to comprehend. How about a shorter time frame? From Donegal, we drive inland, through the u-shaped valleys, the hanging valleys, the cirques, the scree, the ribbon lakes of the most recent ice age. Shorter time, easier to grasp. 20,000 years. 50,000 years. Time when our ancestors, not yet here, lived and loved and laughed and adapted to (or failed to adapt to) the changing climate. The landscape here is barren, in hues of grey and purple, still in its post-glacial youth.
Down through Monaghan, the road winds through what the glaciers left behind as they retreated in a warming world. Now, we are getting closer to our time. Only 10,000 or 9,000 years ago. The blink of an eye. The drumlins, those hills of glacial debris, all sloping together, like eggs in a basket, their blunt stross ends facing back northwest in the direction of the retreating ice, their more gently sloping lee ends looking southeast to a warmer world. The drumlins are bright green farmland now, criss-crossed with hedges, stone walls and fences. Cattle and sheep graze on the mineral rich grass. We have made them our home.
From the drumlins we drive across the eskers, the long collection of the Eiscir Riada, dried streams of glacial melt water that left behind the stone and sand and gravel that we drive along and extract and graze our animals on.
And now I am home. In the Bog of Allen. The raised bog, so similar and yet so different to the blanket bog I walked across in Donegal. This too is a remnant of the last ice age, the trapped melt water with no escape from the depression at the centre of the island. As the world warmed, trees grew and died and grew and died, over 10,000 years. Heaney wrote of the bog
Missing its last definition
By millions of years.
They’ll never dig coal here,
Only the waterlogged trunks
Of great firs, soft as pulp.
Our ancestors lived here, buried their dead here, punted their boats here. Archaeologists have found hoards of gold buried here and urns of butter still edible after 5000 years.
In the blink of an eye, we have ripped up the Bog of Allen. Heaney was wrong when he wrote ‘The wet centre is bottomless.’ In my lifetime, we have reached the bottom – digging, extracting, exhausting. And what did we find there? An earlier history told in seashells and calcified rock. From a time before. But to comprehend that, we must step back from this moment, to look across millions, tens of millions, hundreds of millions of years.
We drive west from Derry and across Donegal. Katie comments that it’s the first time since leaving the midlands that the land has changed. She’s right. The spare glaciated landscape of Donegal is in stark contrast to the raised bogs and green fields that fill the middle of the country.
It’s the 1st of August, Lá Lughnasa, the old Irish harvest festival. Suitably, it’s also the start of the FrielDays Festival, a celebration of Ireland’s great playwright, Brian Friel. As I drive through the landscape that inspired so many of Friel’s plays, I have ply Michael with questions.
Years ago, I read some of Friel’s plays and went to an Abbey Theatre production of Dancing at Lughnasa. We talk mostly about Translations, the great play about place and the meaning of place and the colonial endeavour to translate our Irish place names into meaningless English names (for instance, how my town Eadán Doire – the brow of the oak tree – was transliterated into the meaningless Edenderry, or my parish Clough na Rinca – the dancing stones – was transliterated into Cloherinkoe). The same colonial endeavour that occurred all over the world.
Michael reminds me of the story and the characters in Translations, places the play within the context of the land we’re driving through and explains certain criticisms of Friel’s historical inaccuracies.
But more, Michael regales me with stories of Friel himself, of various family members, pointing out houses they lived in, houses that inspired characters in the plays, of his own encounters with Friel over the years.
Brian Friel’s plays are brought to life for me as I drive through this place. I want to read Translations now and think I must find a copy when I return to Edenderry.
We arrive at the house out on the island. ‘I keep Friel here, of course,’ Michael says, ‘and Heaney.’ An early collected works of Friel and one of Heaney too. He leaves the Friel on the table for me.
So, here I am now, reading Translations in a place that hums with Friel, where the shape of the people and the shape of the land run through each play. Where better to rediscover these plays?
I’ve been working hard lately. After a rather worrying nine-month work drought, during which my editing and ghostwriting work dropped to half of what I would normally expect, the last three months have been among the best I’ve had since I started freelancing ten years ago. But, over the nine months of the drought, I watched my bank balance dip to a worrying low. I tightened my belt, carefully budgeted for groceries, dropped a number of subscriptions, cut out weekends away and meals out. But those were only mini bites into my outgoings. The big stuff – the mortgage, my monthly self-employed social security payments, and other such things – well there was no budgeting for them.
I wasn’t alone. Creative industries (and, as an editor and writer, I am in that category) have been hit hard by AI. When we thought things couldn’t get worse, Ebron Skunk’s DOGE slashed funding to US government research that accounts for about 40% of my editing work. Was I worried? Hell yes. Very.
At first, I put the slow-down down to it being summer. August is generally a slow month. But when things didn’t pick up in September, October and onwards, I was well and truly sweating. Work was still trickling in, I was still just about keeping my head above water, but at the start of each month I worried that maybe this month would be the month that I wouldn’t be able to pay my mortgage.
I worked just as hard as ever, saying yes to every editing job that came my way, when before I would have been more picky. I had to dismiss my long-held promise to myself and to the kids that I wouldn’t work on weekends or on school holidays (summer excepted…it’s just too damn long). But I had a whole lot of time on my hands when I wasn’t editing or writing for other people, so I used that time to make contact with potential new clients, to make myself more visible on LinkedIn, to update my website and my online profiles. I had numerous Zoom meetings and phone calls with prospective clients that came to dead ends.
But, in spring, a glimmer of light started to appear down that dark tunnel of money worries. I landed a couple of lovely medium and longer term clients and the one-off editing jobs that are my bread and butter have started to creep up again. I diversified my US work and now have a large ongoing project in addition to almost back to normal flow of one-off jobs. Part of this upturn is down to the work I’ve put in to find work. But I also wonder if clients are starting to realise that what we do as professional editors and writers is far more than what AI is capable of, i.e., human understanding, nuance, humour, and so on.
Since April, every month has been a good month. Fingers crossed, it will continue this way. However, that doesn’t mean I’m out of the woods. I’ve got that bank balance to claw back so that next time a slump comes I’m prepared for it. I’m still not in a position to be picky, so I’m still working most weekends and on holidays. I’m hoping I’ll get to a point soon when I can ease off on that again. I’m 52. I don’t have the energy for this.
Which brings me to Gaia. I’ve been working long hours this past week. I had three deadlines for yesterday. Two of those were really complicated and took far longer to complete than anticipated. When I finally turned my computer off at 9:30 last night I was well and truly ready for a break. But I’m someone who can’t sit still for long. I knew that, if the weather was nice, I’d feel the need to go for a long walk today, to fill up my day with action.
When I woke up this morning it was lashing rain. And it has continued to rain for most of today. No going out. No being active. Gaia insisting that I have the break I well and truly need. I started the morning with 40 minutes of gentle yoga, took the dog for a short walk in the rain, got back into my pajamas when I returned home, and here I remain. I have spent the day curled up in an armchair, drinking mugs of tea and reading the book I’ve been dying to read since the day we got here.
Back to work on Monday but, for now, I am relaxed and at ease and, as I look out the window, I see that it has started to rain again. Thank you Mother Earth.
Saturday was the 40th anniversary of Live Aid. Forty years! I’ve watched a three-part documentary on the BBC about it origins in Band Aid at Christmas of 1984, the build-up to Live Aid, and it’s ongoing legacy. It’s interesting to see the evolution and maturation in understanding in the likes of Bono from charity and ‘feed the hungry’ to equity and justice and the legacy of colonialism. In addition to that documentary, over the weekend, a two-part, seven hour highlights show was released. The girls and I started watching it two nights ago.
Oh boy oh boy. It’s taken me right back to the 13th of July 1985. 11:55am. Twelve year old me in the sitting room in Ballygibbon, waiting for Live Aid to start. I watched it from start to almost the finish. Katie can’t believe that I sat through 16 hours of TV. ‘You’d never do that now,’ she says. ‘You’ll notice my mother didn’t sit down and watch 16 hours of TV,’ I tell her. ‘Who do you think kept me fed and watered through the entire thing?’
The truth is, however, that I didn’t watch 16 hours of Live Aid. By 2:30am, fourteen and a half hours in, I could no longer keep my eyes open. I tried so hard to stay awake, but I just couldn’t. So, I went to bed and missed the final hour and a half.
Watching it now, I can’t believe that I still know the lyrics to so many songs. Never mind the songs that remain in the zeitgeist – We will rock you, Sunday bloody Sunday, Get into the groove; I remember every lyric to Nik Kershaw’s Wouldn’t it be good and Howard Jones’ Hide and Seek. Where in the depths of my brain have those lyrics been buried all these years?
There are the bands and artists I loved then – Spandau Ballet, U2, Madonna, Paul Young, Queen – and others that I couldn’t stand and was bored to watch back in 1985. It would take another two decades for me to appreciate the genius of Paul Weller, David Bowie, Elton John, and I look at their performances now with delight.
There is a notable lack of women – although more in Philadelphia than in London. We still have a couple of hours to go tonight, but so far, I’ve seen only Sade and Alison Moyet in London, and Madonna, Chrissy Hind and Joan Baez in Philadelphia. (Lily says, of Joan Baez, ‘That lady looks like you mum.’ That makes me happy). Alison Moyet, with that incredible voice, only comes on to support Paul Young. (Ahhh Paul Young. I was in love with him. A couple of months later, when I started secondary school, during a Geography lesson on the Irish fishing industry, my teacher, Mr. Byrne, asked if anyone knew the meaning of the word ‘proximity’. My hand shot up. ‘To be close to something,’ I said. Mr. Byrne asked me to put it in a sentence. ‘I’d like to be in close proximity to Paul Young.’ Mr. Byrne laughed. I laughed. The rest of the class realised they had a nerd on their hands. That was the first of many geography-based jokes that were to pop out of me over the next five years.)
Lily and Katie know a remarkable number of the songs and artists, mainly from watching series like Stranger Things and Glee and from being force-fed this music on car journeys. What is new to them is putting faces to the songs. I am struck that, from my ancient perspective, most of these musicians are barely older than my kids are now. So many of them are fresh-faced and speak with squeaky kid voices when they’re interviewed. I realise that even David Bowie and Bryan Ferry, who seemed ancient to me back then, were younger in 1985 than I am now. That’s sobering!
I’m struck by the simplicity of 1985 cutting edge technology – the giant TV cameras, all the musicians and cameras plugged into the mains and people working specifically to ensure the lines don’t get tangled. The stages in both London and Philadelphia are decorated like a stage at a village fete, and the methods for making donations are so antiquated that I can’t even begin to explain to the kids what bank giros and postal orders are.
But what is most striking are the musicians themselves. They look like normal people in a way that normal people today don’t even look like normal people any more. There are no veneers, no lip fillers, no botox, no hair plugs, no plastic surgery. There are two young women who pick up litter in my little village in Spain who have had more work done on them than all the musicians in Live Aid combined.
No-one appears to have a stylist or a wardrobe assistant. Madonna (Madonna! Have you seen that woman lately?) looks like she washed her hair and perhaps ran a hair dryer over it. No more. (She looks lovely) Steve Norman of Spandau Ballet looks like he’s wearing multiple layers of women’s blouses that he bought at Primark – probably because he did. And no stylist in the world would have let Bono out on the stage in that rig-out! There are mullets galore – I have never seen so many mullets in my life. People I didn’t remember having mullets, have mullets. And, I’m reminded of something I heard some time ago along the lines of ‘there must have been a shortage of conditioner back in the 80s’. There’s so much dry hair on display!
It’s a step back in time for me, to that very hot summer of 1985. It was so hot that we were allowed to not wear our uniforms during the last few weeks of school. It was a summer that I thoroughly enjoyed, and the build up and aftermath of Live Aid was a big part of that. We’ve a couple of hours still to go tonight, when the action will move exclusively to Philadelphia. I can’t remember who’s yet to come, but I’m looking forward to it.
From the moment my parents took me to see Bambi when I was about four years old, I’ve been a cinephile. There have been so many phases to my cinema going – with Daddy and/or my cousin Sean, every Tuesday evening with my cousin Colette and her friends when I was still a pre-teen, and then, once I got to university, spending every penny of spare change I had on going to the movies. I’d go with friends and I’d go on my own. Lots of my friends spent their spare money on Silk Cut cigarettes; I spent mine on Kevin Costner.
In my third year of my undergraduate degree, I had a two hour cartography class at 10am every Friday. There were two problems with that. First, found the class boring and, second, midway between my house and the Maynooth Geography department was the bus stop for the number 66 bus into Dublin.
I attended the first few classes of the first term but, as the weeks wore on, I found myself more and more often stepping into the bus if it happened to be there as I walked past. On those days when I got on the bus rather than going to my cartography class, I would arrive in Dublin in time to fit in three films throughout the day. I can’t remember the names of the cinemas or if they’re there any more, but there was one on either side of O’Connell Street and another over on the end of D’Olier Street. Sometimes I’d spend all day in one cinema, other days I’d flit from one to the other and back again, grabbing a cheap sandwich in between. I went to see everything, apart from horror; some films I saw multiple times, even going out at the end of one showing to buy a ticket and go straight back in to the next.
Soon I was hopping on the number 66 bus every Friday morning, not thinking twice about the class I was missing or the assignments I was supposed to be completing and submitting every week.
One week, the bus wasn’t there, so I carried on to the Geography department and into my class. I sat amongst my friends and the class began. About 20 minutes in, there was a knock on the door and Professor John Sweeney asked if he could see me. I got up and went out with him. (My friend Niamh told me later that she thought I was being called out because I was going to get some award for my excellence in geography!! One thing I’ve always loved about Niamh is her blind faith in me!!)
I followed Professor Sweeney up to his office and he sat me down. He seemed very concerned about me. ‘How are you?’ he asked. When I told him I was great, he asked how was my family, how was my health, how were things at home. To all his questions, I told him everything was great. I had no idea where he was going with this.
‘We have students who start out poorly in this cartography course and then drop out. And we have those who start out well, but then their assignment grades drop and then they drop out. But you,’ he said. ‘You started out with good grades and then suddenly stopped submitting your assignments. So I’m worried that something is wrong.’
A smile broke out on my face. Relief. And told him the truth. About my love of cinema. About the timing of the number 66. About how I spent my Fridays. About finding the cartography class a bit boring. My honesty disarmed him or caught him off guard. He was probably relieved that he didn’t have a student in crisis situation on his hands. Whatever it was, he gave me another shot.
Monday was a bank holiday, so he gave me until Tuesday at 10am to submit the seven assignments I’d missed. I returned to class. I spent the next three days catching up (admittedly with a major dollop of help from Niamh’s, Paula’s, Sinead’s and Fionnuala’s assignments) and handed them in on Tuesday morning. I didn’t miss a Friday morning cartography class for the rest of the year.
I thought about all of this at 10:30 this morning when Katie suggested we race into Leamington to catch the 11:10am showing of Jurassic World Rebirth. I sat in the dark at the cinema, my eyes wide, excitement mounting as the trailers rolled. I looked over at Katie, and thought ‘That’s my girl.’
I’m walking along the Grand Union Canal that runs behind the estate where my father-in-law lives. It’s a glorious evening and I’m on a video call with Katie who is away on the south coast this week with Lily and their uncle and aunt. I walk past four or five narrow boats. On the last boat in the row, a modest white and blue steel boat, a man is standing. I have the phone up, so he thinks I’m filming him or taking his photograph. He gives me a big smile and says something. But I’m talking to Katie, so there’s some confusion. He then realises that I’m not taking his picture and I realise that he’s talking to me. More than that, I hear his Irish accent and he hears mine.
“Where are you from?” he asks. “Kildare,” I reply. “Ah, a Lillywhite,” he says and I know immediately that I am firm ground. Despite his Dublin accent, he tells me he’s from Dungarvan in Co. Waterford. “The husband of one of my best friends is from Dungarvan,” I tell him. I tell Katie I’ll call her later because I have a feeling I might be chatting here for a while.
Sean and I chat for an hour, me standing on the grassy tow-path, he on the open deck of his narrow boat, the air cooled engine exposed to the evening air. We discover we have people and places in common. He pootled a narrow boat up to the harbour in Edenderry in the late 1960s and remembered going for a drink at The Harbour House. That was my uncle Tom’s favourite haunt, owned by Mary O’Connor, my Irish teacher, and her family. I was only in The Harbour House once, for a pint of Guinness with Tom back in the early 1990s. It was everything you would expect of a small Irish pub, all the old men lined up at the bar. It was renowned for its music and for Mary being as strict behind the bar as she was in the classroom.
Sean tells me about his job at Shannon airport and about people from Edenderry he knew there and at Ardnacrusha power station. I mention people I know who he might have known and we laugh when we get a bit tangled in Johns and Seans and who was who.
I tell him I had been a sailor and we talk about the joys of my Westerly Conway. He wonders how a girl from the Bog of Allen and a boy from the housing estate 20 metres from here could have ended up living on a boat and sailing to the places we did. He tells me of his adventures as a sea sailor and as a narrow boat owner and about his sustainable, no-cost approach to life.
At 80 years of age, he is only a few years younger that Daddy would have been. The Cuban Missile Crisis comes up in conversation (he makes me promise not to tell anyone why) and he shares his reminiscences of those few days in 1962 and I tell him what Daddy told me of his memories and fears of those days.
He explains how he has come to have that Dublin accent but says his heart remains firmly rooted in Dungarvan. He already owns a plot in Dungarvan graveyard where he wishes to be buried when his time comes.
“I had a half pint at the Cape of Good Hope a while ago,” he tells me, referring to the pub just a couple of hundred metres away. “When I went to the bar, I heard two men behind me. A Mayo man and a Galway man. Sure, I had to talk to them. The Mayo man was a bull man.”
“A bull man?” I ask, perplexed. “Ah, you’re too young,” he says. He explains what a ‘bull man’ is and realisation dawns. “Ah,” I say, “You mean the AI man. That’s what we call it where I come from.” He laughs and says how funny that we had that in Ireland where the Catholic church didn’t allow such things for humans. AI, for those of you not in the know, means, artificial insemination, and the Bull man or the AI man was, and remains, an integral part of our dairy and beef industries.
My daughters always tease me when I speak to other Irish people, accusing me of changing the way I talk and the way I hold myself. They’re not wrong. But I don’t do it on purpose. When I’m with other Irish people I become the version of myself that is the oldest part of me. I speak in the way I learned to speak as a baby, in the first accent I ever heard from the people and the place where I grew up. It is the accent, grammar, syntax and vocabulary that I am most comfortable with. There’s no modulation, no register change, no code switching. I am me at my most comfortable.
We all change our registers in different contexts. For instance, the way we speak to small children is not the same as the way we speak in the corporate office. The way we speak in church is not the same as on the terraces of the football stadium. But changing accents is something different. Over the years, I have modulated not only my accent, but the words I use when in conversation and the order in which I say them. Why? Well, for two reasons – one that I am comfortable with, the other less so.
For most of my life, I have chosen to live among people for whom English is not a first language. Therefore, to make myself understood among English speakers in Japan, Nunavut, Spain, and elsewhere, I slow down, speak carefully, use very standardized words and phrases to be understood and to make the person I am speaking to feel more comfortable. That is now second nature to me.
The other reason is that, over the years, I have been very aware of people making fun of my Irish accent – people laughing and repeating my pronunciation, my use of certain phrases or my Hiberno-English sentence structures. In order to reduce the feeling of discomfort (and anger) that this fun-making and ridicule causes in me, I modulate and change register. It’s just easier. I don’t like it, but it is how it is. That too is now second nature to me when I am around native English speakers who are not Irish.
But, when I speak to other Irish people, I can feel my body physically relax. I don’t have to think of an alternative phrase or word for ‘give out’, ‘press’, my use of bring/take, my pronunciation of H and th, or a thousand other usages of words and phrases. I’m not going to be laughed at for calling my parents Mammy and Daddy. I can throw in a reference to the GAA or to Eamon Casey or to the Angelus or to a million other things, and no further explanation is required. I can just be.
All migrants, no matter what their language or their circumstances, experience this distance from their first voice. Some people are happy to leave that first voice behind. I am privileged to have had so many opportunities to travel in my life. I have learned so many wonderful ways to speak and to see the world through the eyes of others. But speaking in the way that is oldest to my being is like relaxing into a large warm bath.
Sean is stuck along this stretch of the canal for the time being, as he waits for a lock gate farther along to be repaired. I tell him that if he’s still there the next time I walk that way, I’ll invite him down to the Cape of Good Hope for a beer. Who knows? Maybe the AI man will be there.
I’ve been writing memoir in one form or another for years. Essays published in newspapers, magazines and online, regular blog posts when we lived on the boat, and these more recent offerings. I’ve been working on longer form memoir for some time too – two unfinished memoirs that have now been smashed together into something very different and that I have been working on now for about a year. And then there is my experiment with a fictional screenplay for a six-part dark comedy, every element of which is stuff that happened to me or to people I know, just not in that order, or in that context, or to those people. Unlike my novelist sister, I lack the imagination to make things up, so everything I write is my direct experience. I’ve taken memoir writing courses and I am a member of a memoir-writing group that meets online a couple of times a month.
Despite writing memoir myself, I have never been much interested in reading it, much preferring fiction and certain forms of non-fiction (science writing and nature writing, in particular). In my mind, a good memoir should read like good fiction. I have read the work of some great memoirists, however – Maya Angelou, Joan Didion, Helen MacDonald, Frank McCourt, Cheryl Strayed, Suleika Jaouad, Barak Obama. One of the best I’ve read in the past few years was Raynor Winn’s The Salt Path. It was phenomenally written – lyrical and immersive, rocking along with the pace and timing of a great novel. I loved it so much that the day after I finished it, I popped it into an envelope and posted it to my old walking buddy Martha Main (Hello, Martha!), in Arviat, Nunavut. I was then delighted to find out a few weeks ago that it had been made into a film, staring Gillian Anderson and Jason Isaacs (Hello to Jason Isaacs) and, as luck would have it, it’s on in the cinema in Leamington Spa this Thursday morning and I plan to go.
So, imagine my surprise when, yesterday evening when I was watching the BBC news with my father-in-law, it was reported that a story in The Observer claimed that the author had lied about key facts in the book, and some of those lies were related to alleged criminality. I read The Observer article and then Mammy, my sister and I had a long chat about it this morning. My sister has also read the book and we had both recommended it to various people (she to her book club). We both had the same feeling of discomfort and feeling like the rug had been pulled from under our feet. It was hard to describe the feeling.
These allegations don’t in any way take from the amazing writing achievement of The Salt Path. It remains lyrical and immersive, tender and heartbreaking. But certain key elements of the story now may not be true. And that leaves a sour taste in the mouth. I’m now not sure that want to see the film.
This raises a bigger question about the role and the duty of the memoir writer. One of my favourite essayists is David Sedaris who, admittedly, I have listened to reading his essays far more than I have read his work. His writing is hilarious and heartbreaking, so that I find myself roaring laughing in one moment and roaring crying the next. But he faced a backlash about two decades ago concerning, not the writing itself, but rather its marketing as non-fiction, and the argument that it was insufficiently factual to be marketed as such. Sedaris clearly manipulates and exaggerates the things that have happened in his life for comic effect. But isn’t that what makes him a great writer – taking the ordinary, the mundane, and seeing in it something fantastical and outrageous? And boy, is it effective!
So, I don’t have a problem with how Sedaris writes because I know he’s exaggerating the truth. But that feels very different to what Raynor Winn is accused of doing. She is accused of criminal activity and of misrepresenting her husband’s illness. She presents her version of events as fact. Maybe they are. Maybe they’re not. But The Observer article is convincing enough that it has left a sour taste in my mouth. And it makes me think very carefully about the way I write my memories and the difference between a memory being true to me and a memory being true.
Not The Salt Path. When I inquired after the book at the library, I was told it had been borrowed this morning. Here’s a sequel.
About this time six years ago, I started to drop in to visit my friend Angela regularly. She was 82 years old at the time. What started as a one-off visit for a gin and tonic one Sunday evening, turned into a weekly affair. I’d pop around at 6 o’clock each Sunday evening (or later during the summer), the gin and tonic on the worktop ready for me to pour. I’d make us a glass each and then we’d sit and chat for the next couple of hours, with Miranda the cat sleeping by the gas fire, Mora the dachshund trying to sneak onto my lap, and Archie the African grey parrot adding his own opinions to the conversation. Our conversations were far-ranging. We talked a lot about the books we were reading, the movies we had watched, with each of us often taking up the others’ recommendations. She frequently quoted poetry to me – long-remembered lines that popped into her conversation, appropriate to whatever we were discussing. We talked politics – from our little village all the way up to the international level. She talked about her childhood during the war, her years in London as a trainee nurse, and then her married life raising her three children in Wales. Being a retired nurse, no topic of conversation was too delicate or too squeamish for our Sunday evenings. With deteriorating eyesight and hearing, she preferred these one-on-one get togethers with friends in the quiet of her own home.
When COVID came the following spring, our Sunday night visits continued via WhatsApp video. We’d each pour a glass of red wine or a gin and tonic in our respective homes, only a few hundred metres away from each other and carry on our conversations are normal. How happy we were when we finally got to meet in person again.
As her eyesight deteriorated, she found ingenious ways to continue reading and watching movies. She turned to Audible and listened to books now and she devised an iPad and magnifying glass set-up to allow her to continue watching movies. For a woman of her years, she was remarkably tech savvy and had a weakness for buying clothes and gadgets and all sorts of wonderful things online.
One Sunday evening in the early summer of 2021, she announced, “I think I’ve gone and something totally mad.” I expected it to be some new online purchase. “What have you done?” I asked. She told me that, at the age of 84, she was tired of living in a house that didn’t have a garden. In whatever remaining years she had, she wanted to grow vegetables again and keep hens. This wasn’t too shocking. After all, at the age of 77, she had decided to sell her home in Wales and moved to Sanlucar de Guadiana. “What are you going to do with this house?” I asked. “I don’t know,” she said. “I haven’t thought about it.” “Would you sell it to me?” I asked. The girls and I were living in a big old rented house at the time and I was despairing of ever having a house of my own. “Yes,” she said, without pausing to think about it. I’d no idea how I was going to afford this house, but was determined to find a way.
And so began the next phase of my relationship with Angela. She was happy to sell me the house, but under certain conditions, the main one being that the girls and I live in it for a year to see if we really liked it. During that year, I would pay her a tiny amount of rent, which would allow me to save up for a deposit for a mortgage. If, at the end of that year, I decided the house wasn’t for us, we could walk away, and she’d put it on the market. A couple of months later, she moved out into her new house – just 50 metres along the same street – and I moved into her old house and she became my landlady. Our weekly get togethers continued, now at her new house and we continued to put the world to rights for those two hours every Sunday evening.
When I quit drinking and she mostly quit drinking, our Sunday evening chats came to an end and I started to drop in to her on Monday or Tuesday mornings instead. I never tired of our conversation and felt something was missing on those occasional weeks when, for one reason or another, I couldn’t make it over to spend time with her.
Almost two years ago she fell in the house, slipping on a piece of plastic on her living room floor. She broke her hip and spent some time in hospital. But soon she was out, valiantly doing her physio exercises and getting her fitness back on a stationary bike that she bought and installed in the spare room. Although she was frustrated with her slow recovery, the rest of us were amazed by her speedy recovery and soon she was out walking the dog again, first using a walker, then crutches, then a walking stick. About six months later, she fell again, this time breaking her wrist, when she got tangled up in the dog’s lead while out walking up a steep hill one morning.
Her eyesight continued to deteriorate and her next ingenious online purchase was a gaming chair and TV. The sight of a tiny 87-year-old woman sitting in a teenager’s gaming chair was something else! I’d drop in and she’d tell me about some 1940s black and white movie she’d watched, recalling Hollywood stars in movies that were old even when I was a kid. She introduced me to The Rest is History podcast and we got great mileage discussing the various episodes we’d listened to.
She remained positive and engaged and witty, despite her body increasingly letting her down. I can’t list all the things she carried on doing – gardening and baking and taking trips back to the UK and just being engaged with the world – that people half her age have already given up on. I thought often of Seamus Heaney’s Field of Vision when I was with her. He might have written the following lines about her:
She was steadfast as the big window itself.
Her brow as clear as the chrome bits of the chair.
She never lamented once and she never
Carried a spare ounce of emotional weight.
She was a loyal friend too, not just to me, but to so many of us in Sanlucar. Every single day, without fail, she had a phone conversation with Val (Honeybunch) her friend back in the UK from her nursing days in London in the late 1950s. That’s friendship for you.
For all her amazing attributes, she was my hero. I don’t aspire to be like her in my 80s; I aspire to be like her now. Her attitude to life was like that of no-one I’ve ever met.
Only four weeks ago, she was diagnosed with incurable cancer. I had the privilege to spend a lot of time with her in the first three of those weeks and, despite her increasingly frail body, we continued to laugh and take an interest in life. On the last day I was with her, when her body seemed to not be able to go on any more, she continued to tell me fascinating stories about her life. When I left to come to England last week, I knew how much I would miss her as we said goodbye for the last time and I knew that she would be sorely missed by all of us who have had the privilege of having her in our lives.
Angela died yesterday afternoon.
Angela handing me the keys three years ago, the day she sold her house to me.
Being in the UK and, in particular, in this town, brings memories of Julian flooding back. I pass through places by car that I only ever drove through with him. I go to places that I visited for the first time, or only ever visited with him. Indeed, I would never have known this town in the middle of England, had I never met him.
There have been times in the past few years, when being here has been overwhelming. Not only being in this place, but being with Julian’s family and the memories and emotions that being in their company brings to the surface. In the past, being here has caused me to have panic attacks. In fact, last year, after only four days, I ended up in A&E (ER) with a panic attack that I thought was a heart attack. That was a scary day.
This time, however, I am so much more at ease. Time has played a part in healing me, so too have eight sessions with a therapist that I gave as a birthday present to myself last year, so too the memoir I’ve been writing this past year. I’m busy with work (intentionally, perhaps?) and I’m absorbing the sensations of being in parks and along canals and surrounded by nature in this exceptionally nature-filled town. (Yesterday, a falcon had an aerial fight with two crows only metres from me in Priory Park!)
Each morning since we got here, I work for a few hours at Warwick Library. Yesterday, I went in as usual. But it wasn’t usual. It was Saturday, so the market was on in the square in front of the library. Even better, at the far end of the square I saw a van bearing the words ‘Jumbo Hot Dogs’. Memories came flooding back. I phoned Katie and suggested that she and Lily get Granddad to drive them to the library in a few hours, so we could wander the market and have jumbo hot dogs for lunch.
The girls duly arrived and I packed up my laptop and we wandered around the market, chatting to the vendors and browsing the arts, crafts and foodstuffs they had on offer. At the food stalls, there were savoury pies and all sorts of lovely things that tempted me. But I was going for the jumbo hot dogs, for nostalgia’s sake more than anything else.
You see, Julian loved jumbo hot dogs. No matter what his state of hunger, if he spotted a jumbo hot dog stand, he had to have one. He was also someone who stuffed receipts into his pockets. When we both worked, we shared the task of doing the laundry. Every time it was my turn to put a load in the machine, I’d first have to empty Julian’s trouser pockets of receipts. When we lived in Cambridge, I’d often find five or six receipts for the jumbo hot dog stand! How long had he been wearing those trousers? Or how many hot dogs was he consuming a day? He’d laugh sheepishly and tell me he’d occasionally get a craving in the middle of work, leave his desk, hop on his bike and cycle the two miles into the middle of Cambridge for a jumbo hot dog and then return to work. Crazy man.
So, there was nothing for it yesterday but to introduce jumbo hot dogs to our daughters, who’d only ever before had those cheap rubbery vacuum packed frankfurters you get at kid’s birthday parties, and not these juicy British sausages, with real fried onions, ketchup, in a soft, freshly baked hotdog roll. Katie wasn’t sure if she wanted one, so I bought two. One bite of mine and I had to go back to get a third from the friendly chatty couple running the van.
Good God, they tasted good, that combination of good food mixed with good memories. As we ate, I told the girls about their father’s jumbo hot dog obsession, another piece of him revealed to them, another good memory of him restored to me.
Me in place 